Editorial: As Trump enacts his agenda, weather services must be protected

During his successful campaign for office, President-elect Donald Trump shrugged off Democratic attacks about the Heritage Foundation’s polarizing “Project 2025,” a roadmap of policy goals for a second term authored by more than 100 members of his first administration.

While there are plenty of worrisome ideas in that manifesto, one in particular — dismantling the federal apparatus that monitors weather and collects climate data — could prove particularly dangerous for places such as Hampton Roads which are at perpetual risk of severe, destructive weather.

It wasn’t long after Trump secured victory on Tuesday night that some of his prominent supporters crowed that Project 2025 would, in fact, form the foundation for policy aspirations in a second term. This was after Trump insisted month after month that he had nothing to do with the document and that it wasn’t connected to his campaign.

The about-face on Project 2025 may be chalked up to excessive revelry at an improbable election win rather than a wholescale reversal by the once and future president. However, some of the policies Trump has touted since Election Day, such as gutting the civil service or using the Department of Justice to serve vengeance on his political opponents, now appear very much in play.

While those are deeply troubling, a less prominent part of the 922-page document concerns those parts of the federal government focused on weather, climate and environmental protections.

Project 2025 calls for breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, calling it “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and … harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

The NOAA contains six offices, including the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service and Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and has an annual budget of about $6.6 billion. Together, they provide Americans critical weather information and essential data about the climate that is invaluable to researchers and scientists.

Trump, of course, does not believe in climate change, despite mountains of rigorously vetted evidence that it is occurring and accelerating. He has called it a hoax perpetrated by China in an effort to undercut the U.S. economy, and has promised to pursue policies that will likely contribute to the problems Hampton Roads residents see with every high tide.

One doesn’t need to be a climatologist to recognize that flooding in our region has worsened over time, or to see that it is more pervasive, frequent and destructive than ever before. Yes, subsidence, or the sinking of the land, plays a role, but rising sea levels due to warming ocean temperatures are having a measurable, and indisputable, effect.

The argument, by Trump and the Project 2025 authors, that it can be willed away by disrupting research or limiting data is not only nonsensical, it’s dangerous. It will ensure that communities such as ours, at the front lines of the battle against flooding, will be less prepared for what’s coming.

That is also true of the Project 2025 proposal to outsource weather forecasting to private companies, such as AccuWeather. The National Weather Service routinely saves lives through its accurate predictions, as anyone who’s evacuated in the face of a hurricane or sheltered from a tornado can attest. The fact that the NWS doesn’t have a profit motive — that it’s only beholden to the public — is a large part of what makes it a trustworthy source of reliable information accessible to all Americans.

Trump won the presidency squarely, and Americans preferred his vision for this country more than his opponent’s. It’s certainly fair to expect that he will seek to enact his agenda, which could bring radical changes to how the federal government operates. One could even argue that some reforms may be well overdue.

But anything that undercuts the important work of NOAA, seeks to dismantle the NWS or undercut critical climate research would put Hampton Roads at grave risk and should be fiercely opposed by our region’s congressional delegation.